Uncertain Afterlives: Anicka Yi’s “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One”
Exhibition view: Anicka Yi, There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Leeum Museum of Art, and Esther Schipper Gallery. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © Anicka Yi / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Anicka Yi’s There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One feels alive, coursing with nonhuman vitality. From the opening corridor of the artist’s solo exhibition at Leeum Museum in Seoul—her first institutional presentation in Asia—the diffusion of a synthetically engineered odor cultivates an embodied experience, alerting visitors to the porousness of their bodies enmeshed within the ecosystem of the exhibition. This ambiguous engineered smell, which struck me as neither particularly good nor bad, conjured a multitude of associations—like the embrace of a grandmother who isn’t my own—none quite right.
The Seoul-born New York-based artist leverages the ineffability of smell as a subjective yet culturally conditioned register that challenges the visual as the primary mode of modern aesthetics, pushing against white-cube tactics of deodorization. Although Yi has previously explored smell, the olfactory takes on new meaning after the COVID-19 pandemic, given how the virus hindered the smelling capacities of some and heightened awareness of the permeability of corporeal borders for almost everyone.
This initial sensory encounter primes visitors for what lies beyond the curtain: a constellation of works from the past two decades involving processes of fermentation, incubation, deterioration, and proliferation in defiance of human fantasies of control. The dimly lit, dark-walled space cultivates an otherworldly air of science fiction—or better put, “biofiction”—as a hybrid genre geared toward these materially unstable installations that deny distinctions between art and science as separate disciplines.
Yi further engages the senses by playing on the double meaning of taste through the incorporation of kombucha leather in Feeling Is A Skill (2015) and tempura-fried flowers in Vinegar Fissure (2024) and Amputation (2024), two towering biomorphic creatures embedded with glass globules and tubing that conjure laboratory-esque potential. Through these literally perishable, perhaps edible fried forms, Yi draws attention to the inevitable processes of decay while challenging art historical logics of preservation through a radical subversion of the still life genre.
Anicka Yi, Another You, 2024, Acrylic, LEDs, MDF, mirror, two-way mirror, bacteria agar, 200 x 200 x 35 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Leeum Museum of Art, and Gladstone Gallery. © Anicka Yi / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Yi also debuts Another You (2024), a sprawling, floor-based vitrine-cum-petri dish in which a mirror renders the growth of synthetically engineered bacteria endless. Through these microbial blooms that seem at once oceanic and galactic, Yi plays with scale—a repeated tactic that prompts thinking beyond anthropocentric perspectives. The aestheticization of bacteria impugns its villainization, while the very premise of genetically manufactured bacteria problematizes fundamental distinctions between the organic and inorganic. Throughout, Yi’s embrace of collaborators—whether bacteria or human scientists—challenges myths of the singular (white, heteronormative, cis-male) artistic genius, while more fundamentally confronting human exceptionalism. Yi further explores nonhuman collaboration in Kñ†M£M (2023–24), a series of wall-based works created through digital software trained on images of her earlier creations and source material. The fluid arrays such as KL§£†Lߧ†R (2024) complicate designations of provenance, anticipating Yi’s most recent video work, Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon (2024), by underscoring the interplay between both digital and analog as imbricated realms of creative possibility.
In the final room of the otherwise non-linear space, the exhibition culminates with the never-before-seen Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon (2024), a video generated by artificial intelligence-fed images of the artist’s oeuvre. A wall-sized screen plays an ever-shifting array: a whirling form vaguely reminiscent of a fidget spinner was already transforming into a pasta-looking growth, which was already becoming a rigid lattice. These slowly morphing figures, ever-teetering toward formlessness, were mesmerizing, straddling the familiar and the radically strange, the forever unknowable.
On one hand, this video—a revitalization of earlier work—accentuates the thematic continuity across installations that together reinforce the imbrication of the biological and the technological as always already overlapping. Insofar as a hybridized flora-fauna form recalls both the tempura-fried flowers and the nearby Radiolaria (2023–24), for example, the position of the video in the immediate context of her earlier work is crucial in lending sensory resonance to the digital display, while heightening appreciation of the inextricable overlap of the physical and virtual realms.
Exhibition view: Anicka Yi, Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon. Courtesy of the artist, Leeum Museum of Art, and Esther Schipper Gallery. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © Anicka Yi / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The conceptual premise of AI collaboration complicates the very logic of the cohesive, stable artistic oeuvre attributable to a human individual. Through this video commencing her ongoing Emptiness project, Yi considers how her work might actively evolve or live on past her death—not as an initiative of preservation, but rather, the opposite—as a fundamental recognition of impermanence. What might seem like a reflexive interrogation of her own positionality might simultaneously constitute a displacement of the self. Although Yi is alive and looming as the primary agent behind this survey, the implication of nonhuman collaboration nonetheless confronts humanist fantasies while advancing questions surrounding the potential for sensory engagement through screens.
By foregrounding the creative potentials of AI in the context of her own death, Yi evinces pragmatism that defies techno-pessimist fears. Given the consistent care with which the artist selects titles, There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One evokes technologization, and perhaps the so-called “AI revolution” not as a radical shift, but an ongoing process long predating digitization. The title, which leverages the open-endedness of Buddhist koans, conjures an expansive concept of evolution that de-centers humanity, further inviting us to think across scales of matter over broadened timeframes.
Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One is on view at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul through December 29, 2024.
